Three Web Thingies

I’ve had one of those evenings when I get distracted by stuff on the net and get absolutely none of my planned work done. OK, that happens almost every night, but this time was slightly different in that the stuff that distracted me was actually worth being distracted by. Or, I tell myself that anyway. So, in an exercise in self-justification, I’m spamming you all with my handy little discoveries so that you can help ease my guilt by telling me how really wonderful and useful they all are. (That’s your cue, guys. Got it?)

Feeds in Firefox

Assuming you’re using the Firefox browser (and if you’re not… WHACK!... there’s one upside the head) I just figured out how to use it with sites that provide RSS feeds.

[At this point I’m absolutely certain that one or two Firefox gurus among you are saying “WHAT! It took him that long to get THAT?!?” I can also all but guarantee that the rest of the list is saying “RSS feeds? I think I’ve heard of that somewhere….” Sorry. It’s an age thing, guys. Most of us are not hip to it for the same reason we all don’t have a My Spaces accounts and we all still primarily use old fashioned email instead of instant messaging. But I digress…]

Point Firefox at any site that offers a feed. My blog is one. Notice that when you are viewing a site with a feed on it that up in the Firefox address bar that there is a little icon that looks like a radar dish over in the right hand side of the address field. Click that little doohickie to create what Firefox calls a “Live Bookmark” and save it like you would a regular bookmark. Now go find that bookmark and click on it. If it worked, clicking the live bookmark will not take you directly to my site. Instead, it will show you a dynamically updated list of links to the last few posts on my blog! Click one to jump to that post. Neat, huh?

Researching this was prompted by a comment Eric made after I advertised my blog site. He noted that he’d prefer an email, because he just wasn’t going to go out and check my blog site over and over again to find out if I’d posted recently. I knew exactly what he was talking about, but I joked that he needed to get into the 21st century and start using a feed reader for these sorts of things. Now I was joking, because I knew from personal experience that having to have a separate app just for RSS feeds is bit too ‘hard core’ for most of us. But then I vaguely remembered that Firefox had something for this, and went to check it out. OK, it isn’t the same as getting an email update, but it’s better than nothing (and if all of you lazy bums follow this advice, then I don’t have to send out reminders to read my blog! ;-)

Bookmarking in Magnolia

OK, now I’m going to do a 180 and show you a way to stop using a feature in your browser: ordinary bookmarks!

Magnolia (http://ma.gnolia.com/) is a ‘social bookmarking’ site. Translation: it is a web site that lets you store and manage your bookmarks on-line. Sounds stupid (that was my initial reaction) but it’s one of those ‘religious’ things. You know, like cell phones, or girlfriends. You will swear you don’t need one and that people who are addicted to them are all morons… until you get one yourself that you like and undergo a sudden ‘religious conversion’, whereupon you suddenly can’t live without them and in fact start proselytizing to everybody about how great they are.

[I seem to be on this “religious analogies” kick tonight. Apologies. Not sure why…]

The plusses of using Magnolia? Get to all your links when you’re away from your home PC (e.g. at work). Search your links based on your tags. Find links other people have saved in Magnolia using the same tags, to find related sites. Share links among ‘groups’ of people with common interests. Don’t worry about loosing your links if your PC crashes. That’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

The original ‘breakthrough’ site in this space was Delicious (http://del.icio.us), which not only started the social bookmarking trend, but also fired-up the huge Web 2.0-ish trend around tagging (or maybe that was Technorati, I’m not sure). I’m not going to explain tags in detail, as it will sound even stupider to the uninitiated than social bookmarking does. If you’re curious enough to play with Magnolia or Delicious for an hour, you’ll just have one of those ‘aha’ moments and suddenly grok tagging. For the sceptics among you, I’ll note that the creator of Delicious, who started it as kind of a hobby, has just sold out his deceptively simple little web site for a tonne of cash and is now independently wealthy.

Why Magnolia instead of Delicious? Usability. Delicious works, but is clunky in parts and not terribly attractive. Also, since the guy sold the site, a couple of features have been off-line for maintenance for a while. I’m suspicious of when it will be back up to full functionality. Magnolia is just ‘slick’, and everything works beautifully. I’m into ‘user experience’ so I voted with my feet (er, “bookmarks”) and went with Magnolia.

Magnolia will allow you to easily upload all the bookmarks you already have in your browser to the web site, so you don’t have to ‘start from scratch’. Note that, if you collect a lot of links (I’m closing in on 500) the upload feature will take a while. Send the file and then check back in an hour or ten. This is because Magnolia creates and stores both a miniature image of each linked page and a full copy of the contents at the time you create the (Magnolia) bookmark, so there is a lot of back-end processing happening after the upload.

[And, just in case you’re wondering, no, you can’t use Magnolia to store the RSS feed ‘live bookmarks’ I showed you how to create in the first tip. Magnolia only works with standard bookmarks. You would use the RSS ones only within Firefox.]

Wiki

Here’s yet a third thing you can put alongside RSS and ‘tagging’ in the folder labelled “things old farts like us generally just don’t get”: wiki. Some of the more techno-literate among us may use wikis all the time (hands?) but I’m betting most don’t. The ‘poster child’ for wiki sites is, of course, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), the mammoth on-line encyclopaedia built and maintained by armies of amateurs around the globe. I won’t get into the merits and (many) flaws of Wikipedia, as it is the underlying idea of the wiki I’m going to go on about here.

The basic idea of the wiki is a web page that is editable right in the browser, by anybody. If you are looking at an entry in a wiki and spot a mistake, you can just click a link or button that will allow you to edit that page and correct it, right there in your browser, and see the change saved immediately.

Now why would anybody build such a thing? Well, for ‘living’ information (things like product documentation, project plans, etc.) this has huge productivity advantages over other solutions. No, really.

Think about any project you’ve ever been a part of at work that involved writing up project documentation. If you write those documents as Word files you end up emailing them back and forth, then going through painful contortions to keep track of updates and who has the current version. With email (or forums) you can dynamically discuss changes ad nauseum, but you end up having to go back to a (Word) document to actually make the changes. Then, when the document is signed-off, you should, in theory, publish the changes someplace easy to find, like on the company intranet. But in reality that almost never happens, and so, next year when somebody wants to find why a certain decision was made in your project, they have to go on this ridiculous hunt to locate the document(s), which are always buried deep in the corporate file system in some obscure folder structure that is completely opaque to anyone with a brain, then dig through the Word file to find the right information.

In a wiki, the document is always on-line and always just in one place and always up-to-date with the latest changes. And everybody who is looking at the wiki can act as an editor, fixing things immediately, rather than funnelling changes to someone who has the document. That tends to have lots of cool side effects, like actually seeing people update things of their own volition, instead of the document author having to stalk the floors trying to bribe or bully people into reading/editing/contributing to/approving his or her work so that they can get the thrice-damned thing signed-off.

Now, at least half of you are freaking out at this point thinking something along the lines of “That’s insane! If we let just anyone edit a document at any time, all we’ll end up with is a giant pile of crap!” In practice, it doesn’t really work out that way. You get a trade-off, of course. Quality is uneven, depending on people’s editing skills, but the gains you get from having a living document always available on the intranet always (IMHO) far outstrip the (imaginary or minor) issues that crop up from letting everyone play with the text. And modern full-feature wikis come with access permissions (so you can restrict reading and editing to certain groups of people) and full versioning (so you can recover an older version of a page if it is accidentally or maliciously deleted), so you aren’t really working without a net.

Wiki, like RSS and ‘tagging’ sites, are one of those trendy Web 2.0 things. Unlike the other two, though, wiki generates much stronger negative reactions from people, and the love-it-or-hate-it profile tends to break down by personality type rather than age. Relaxed, easygoing, optimistic and people-oriented types tend to love wiki. Uptight, control freak, and cynical types tend to loathe it with a passion.

Personality wise, I’m generally in the latter group, but I’ve managed to overcome my initial impression and looked at it objectively. My conclusion: my fears were largely groundless. For collaborative content creation, wiki just rocks. Now, if you personally don’t like ‘collaborating’ on work, well, that’s your problem, not the wiki. It’s just a tool. A tool that I personally hope will one day spell the end of !*%#$-ing bureaucratic MS Word document editing that wastes so much time on software development projects.

TenFootWiki

Now, doing another 180, I’m going to point you to a wiki that is intended solely for single person use. Why, you ask? Because (a) I’m a subversive bastard and (b) the particular use it’s put to is pretty cool. It’s a wiki that a tabletop GM can use to record and manage all the bits and pieces of information about their game world. This one is built by well known RPG web guy Uncle Bear, and can be found here: http://www.unclebear.com/tenfootwiki/

If you follow that link, you’re looking at the wiki. Just start clicking stuff and rolling over entries to see how it works. If you want a copy to use it yourself, just hunt around for the entry entitled “About GTD TiddlyWiki”. There is a Getting Started section in that. Follow the instructions in the first sentence to copy the html file to your PC. Guess what? You now have the whole thing, ready to run. Nothing else needed. No, really! Locate the html file you saved to disk and open it in your browser. Start editing stuff. You’re off and running.

[Note that, if you actually want to start using it in anger, start with a fresh copy of the file and rename and file it away as appropriate. You can create multiple personal use wikis (for multiple campaigns, say) just by making a copy of the original file in a new location.]

Now, most (all?) of us no longer run any tabletop RPG campaigns, but I’m passing the link to the TenFootWiki more so you can see the potential than because I think it is something you need. For example, TenFootWiki was built by customising GTDWiki, which was created to support people who use a certain style of managing “todo” lists, and GTDWiki is itself a customisation of the original, general-purpose TiddlyWiki. The point? You can relatively easily customise any of the versions here for use as a personal information base for whatever it is that you need to keep track of lots of notes for. Gardening, home maintenance, terrorist cell operational planning, whatever.

…and with that, I’ve typed myself into exhaustion. Which will come as a relief to all of you who struggled through this far, no doubt. ;-)

Hope some of you found this interesting, and perhaps even useful. Now I’m for bed.

- Christopher